I can't remember where I heard of this book, but I did, and I bought it secondhand in May. Maybe I heard about it at the writing conference I went to in early May. I bought it from eBay for a few quid and I picked it up in September just after my holiday.
It is a really grim and gruesome book and I'm left not really sure how I feel about it. I can see why it's really compelling and I just had to keep reading, but I'm sort of uncomfortable. It feels a lot like torture porn, and I'm not sure that this author was the right person to write this. The comparisons to Room and Misery are really apt... but I sort of feel like the world has moved on a bit since both those books. Even Room is fourteen years old now.
The protagonist is Jane. Her name is not Jane, though. Her name is Thanh Dao and she is a Vietnamese national who was trafficked to England with promises of a good life and money to send back to her family. She was with her sister, Kim-Ly. Thanh ended up being imprisoned by Leonard on his desolate fenland farm in Norfolk or Linncolnshire, something like that. At the very beginning of the book she tries to escape by walking miles and miles to a road. However, he catches her, and as punishment he burns one of her final posessions. When she arrived, she had seventeen. She is now just down to four. One of them is the sheaf of letters from her sister. Kim-Ly is working in Manchester in a nail salon and Thanh knows that she isn't far off paying off her debt to the men who trafficked her; all that Thanh has to do is keep with Lenn for a couple more years and then Kim-Ly will be free, and then Thanh doesn't really care what happens to her then. She has already been a prisoner here for seven years.
She has a disabled foot. After a previous escape attempt, Lenn broke her ankle with a pair of bolt cutters and it has healed badly. Thanh can't run and can only walk by dragging her foot behind her. She lives in constant pain and Lenn keeps her drugged with horse tranquilisers. He is a complete monster; I don't think that can be emphasised enough. Everything she does is observed, everything she does wrong is punished. He rapes her repeatedly. Near the beginning of the book she realises she is pregnant. Thanh has tried to escape and tried everything she can think of to escape, but hasn't ever been able to.
A woman called Cynthia arrives one day, asking if she can rent one of Lenn's fields for her horse. Thanh is terrified, but is this the catalyst that she needs to escape?
I liked the setting of the book - I could imagine the flat countryside with very little traffic and with nowhere for Thanh to run to. I liked Thanh and wanted her to succeed. I understood why she had come to England and felt sorry for her. I won't give any more details of the book because I think they would be spoilers, but a lot happens.
However, as I said, I do think parts of the book were just sordid and gruesome for the sake of it. Room does this better, maybe because it is from the point of view of a child. I felt like the author was labouring the point a bit, and the end of the book too, even though the book is barely 250 pages so not long at all. I'm also not sure that a white man like Will Dean was the right person to write the story of a trafficked Vietnamese woman. It makes me feel uncomfortable. For those reasons, I can only give this three out of five.
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